A Tale of two rifles

Some :D
Have had a lot of visitors at my place this past month. Kinda been a revolving door LOL
I've had the pleasure to meet several m14 owners who managed to find their way to my neck of the woods to get me to have a look at their rigs. All for fun of course. And I have a tonne of long time fishin buds who use my pad as base camp this time of year.
I tried doing some vids but they really suck haha so won't post those. But I've been taking stills and pre writing the commentary ;)
I'll be back with updates and a full run down ;)
 
This whole thing would go quicker if I hadn'( A) dropped my .308 match reamer the day after I started this thread.
I don't dare use it on ottoman's krieger.
B) I mistakenly ordered the clymer 30-06 reamer , have since sold it to a guy here who I knew needed one, and now am enjoying the wait for tHe correct PT reamer kit to finish the chamber.

Anyone have a .308 clymer reamer kit they can lend or rent me to speed this up a lil ? :D
 
well, this thread can continue now :D

Thanx to Buckaroo who was kind enough to lend me his reamer kit while I wait for a new one to show up.

I have some pics i'll add in the am but for now.
the Chinese rifle arrived and the trigger group was pretty much junk LOL off center trigger pin causing it to walk out and also set the sears up at a not so horizontal angle to the hammer hooks. a common thing with Chinese trigger groups so not a warranty issue as far as I'm concerned and considering it was a 560.00 rifle delivered :D . so first thing is I've ordered up another trigger group..... so we will be adding 100 bucks right off the bat to the price of the rifle...... keeping this under a grand is gonna be a challenge :D
I also ordered up an S&J HARDWARE million cycle oprod spring and their fantastic NM oprod spring guide rod. I paid for these and the kind words are not coerced LOL I am a fan of their m14 kit. (they should make more m14 kit :D )

now before I install anything other than the factory trigger group replacement, I'll fire a 10 round, benched , deliberate fire max 5 seconds per shot 50 yard group for a baseline on the bone stock Chinese rifle. we will mark and save that target for reference as the upgrades are completed.

So..... I'll deal with the Chinese rifle when the trigger arrives from weimajack

the LRB M25 receiver now wears a Krieger barrel, short chambered, chromoly 18.5" medium 1/11 twist
now hand cranking this together gave me a barrel position of 23 degrees off TDC (index position)....... hmmmm without a lathe it would be off to the machinist as it would require WAY to much foot pounds of force to bring the barrel to TDC/index...... not good.
thankfully I got this covered :D
so a 1 degree undercut at the shoulder , just a hair as a very little goes a long way when removing any material at the barrel shoulder.
so a quick calculation and tool hits steel ;)
next hand fit showed about 16 degrees off TDC at hand tight..... fricken perfection and right where you want to see it when you do this yourself. 15 to 17 ish degrees at hand tight should afford the necessary 80 to 90 foot pounds of torque to draw the barrel to index with an undercut shoulder. For a 90 degree shoulder there are other torque values for drawing to index but my mentors taught me to do it the way I do so an undercut shoulder it is. 1 degree is the ticket :D
I have no pics of the machine work as I have no stand or helper to hold the camera. kinda rules out video as well. but on with the build
The pics I have will explain what I mean.

now, I should back up a bit here and address the bolt. I chose the LRB bolt for this build as it just slid shut perfectly and is in much better cosmetic condition as compared to the very nice but used TRW bolt also supplied. Both fit nice but the LRB just a hair tighter, which for building a match rifle..... is what we want to see.
setting the bolt up in the receiver with the brownells M1A bolt lapping tool showed full lug engagement on both sides of the bolt and full closure, so no initial set up lapping required for the lugs. This bolt can now wait till after the barrel is installed and near finish reamed, then i'll mate the lugs fully.
I know there are a few opinions out there on how to do the above part, I got my ways and it's been working for me and the builds I've done ;)

so now, we have the LRB M25 receiver with the Krieger barrel installed to index and the chamber cut to 1.6295 with the CLYMER (M852) .308 match pull thru reamer and copious amounts of cutting fluid.
I'll post the pics in the morning
the next part will involve installing the oprod guide to it's barrel boss and choosing the oprod that best fits the rifle, of the two supplied.
I expect to have this build wrapped up within a couple days and test fired on the weekend but will fill in the blanks before we get that far :D
 
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Looking good! Thanks for helping us 'Mericans with their rifles. I remember you and powmia56 doing rifle clinics in 2009. Those that attended had a great time, IIRC.

I'm also in the process of building an M25 right now. I'm waiting on a new barrel from Jon Wolfe; a 22" stainless 5R barrel. Looking forward to seeing your results.

Tony.
 
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Damn... I wish that you'd come back to doing clinics (this isn't a request, I understand why not). There's just not enough people out here that know what they're talking about, it seems.

One wonders, is it worth the three tanks of fuel it would take, plus the few days off, to see if one could drive out to your nook in the woods.... haha

thanks for the thread so far, awesome hearing about this stuff.

Any chance of giving some more details on how you actually do this stuff, or is it all easy enough to find by searching? Specifically i'd love to know what you look for to see if a bolt fits a receiver well, other than lug engagement. I'm going to have a JRA bolt coming here soon, and it wants to go into a Norinco (2012 I think) receiver. The current bolt actually has decent engagement, but the headspace is about 1.630 MILES (don't actually know exactly what it is, but I do know that I can physically SEE the difference in shoulder position between fired and unfired cases... don't think that's how it is supposed to be, and I'm hoping someone comes along with a headspace gauge in calgary I can borrow to find out for sure how bad it really is.
 
Well guys, this thread almost ruined my marriage LOL
So I did a whole bunch of leg work, buidling and shooting and taking pics. Then I went hunting. When I cam home, my darling wife had "cleaned up" my upstairs gun room. You see, she has a compulsive disorder with keeping our house like a church LOL
I haven't found the cammera card with all the pics and on top of that... I had the LRB targets and brass in one pile and the m305 brass and targets in another pile. To be organized and summarized when I got home from hunting. The targets got burned in the wood stove and the brass dumped into my 5gallon fired brass bucket I keep in my gun room.
Things are still pretty tense at my place but each day seems to come and go now that the Fbombs and general volume of "conversation" has abated some.
Needless to say, this is another thread I will not get to finish.
Sorry for the let down folks.
 
Yeah, I hate when they're always cleaning and organizing...I can never find anything after lol,..my wife learned long ago, NEVER touch anything in the gunroom,,

Hey, you could always start over...on the m14 test project that is, not the wife,,,lol
 
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